Main menu

Monthly Archives: September 2008

I teach ballroom dancing at UNC Chapel Hill, among other places. At UNC, these classes are mostly for the students (mainly undergraduates). Yesterday when I was teaching our usual weekly class, I tried something that I haven’t done for a while. I was teaching my students about good dance frame. I gave them some basic idea, but then instead of going on and on talking about it and letting them try as we typically do, I let them all fix each other. I made half the people get in their frames and asked the other half to observe and correct them as needed. Then we switched the roles. Surprisingly, every time we did this, the “fixers” could fix those trying their dance frame in almost perfect positions.

In other words, letting an expert (in this case, myself) go around and fixing everyone, letting a group of novice participants worked much more effectively!